Volume 30 | Number 3 ( 2013)
pps. 115-137
The "Labour Prophet"?: Representations of Walt
Whitman in the British Nineteenth-Century
Socialist Press
Kirsten Harris
ISSN 0737-0679 (Print)
ISSN 2153-3695 (Online)
Copyright © 2013 Kirsten Harris
Recommended Citation
Harris, Kirsten. "The "Labour Prophet"?: Representations of Walt Whitman in the British
Nineteenth-Century Socialist Press." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 30 (2013), 115-137.
Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.13008/2153-3695.2067
This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by Iowa Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review
by an authorized administrator of Iowa Research Online. For more information, please contact [email protected].
THE “LABOUR PROPHET”?:
REPRESENTATIONS OF WALT WHITMAN
IN THE BRITISH NINETEENTH-CENTURY
SOCIALIST PRESS
K irsten Harris
The significance of Walt Whitman to British socialism has long been
recognized: in the emerging fin de siècle labor movement, socialist periodicals printed articles about him and extracts from his poems; socialist
orators spoke of him and quoted from Leaves of Grass; his poems were
set to music, published in labor movement songbooks, and sung at Labor
Church meetings; Leaves of Grass was advertised and recommended to
socialist readers alongside economic and political publications; he was
even featured in a calendar of socialist saints. As M. Wynn Thomas
has convincingly argued in relation to Edward Carpenter’s Whitmanesque collection of poetry Towards Democracy, these can be seen as acts
of “translation”: Whitman’s democratic vision was removed from its
American context and reconstructed so that it was applicable to Britain
and the socialist cause.1 For Whitman, “America” and “democracy”
were “convertible terms,” interchangeable conceptually and linguistically.2 Clearly, British commentators did not interpret “democracy” in
this way, and as Thomas observes, it was a “very heatedly contested
term.”3 Socialists were one group who incorporated it into their vocabulary, and in the discourses of this movement, “democracy” tended to be
used either synonymously with “socialism,” or to denote an overarching
category which included not only socialism but other movements which
worked towards creating a more equal society. In this way, Whitman,
who was frequently dubbed the “poet of democracy” by contemporary
critics, was seen to have a special “message” for the labor movement
and could be claimed as a poet of British socialism.
This essay is part of a larger research project which examines how
Whitman was represented, interpreted, and used in socialist publications
in the late nineteenth century. My aim is to use examples, or “specimens” (to use a Whitmanian term), from three periodicals to give an
overview of some of the ways in which he was invoked by fin de siècle
socialist journalists. It is not always easy to determine what constitutes
a socialist publication; at the end of the nineteenth century, anarchism
115
and socialism were not such distinct ideologies, and it can be difficult
to pinpoint where radical liberalism ended and socialism began. For the
purposes of this study I follow Deborah Mutch in defining the socialist
periodical in the same way that Deian Hopkin defines the “left-wing
press”: as “papers that espoused socialism or one of its variants and
generally regarded themselves as politically on the opposite side, so to
speak, of the conventional press.”4 The periodicals selected—Seed-Time,
The Labour Prophet, and The Labour Leader—span a period from 1889
(when the first number of Seed-Time was published) to 1922 (when The
Labour Leader became The New Leader). This gives a sense of progression, showing how socialism developed and how this development had
an impact on the way that socialist periodicals treated Whitman and
literature more generally.
These three publications were chosen according to two further
criteria. First and most obviously, they had to engage with Whitman
and his work. This criterion was not established in an attempt to provide
a skewed notion of Whitman’s importance but, rather, to show how he
was appropriated when he was appropriated. The second consideration
was variety, as I felt it would be fruitful to examine journals that served
different socialist purposes and had different intended readerships. As
the journal for the Fellowship of the New Life (a group “interested in
religious thought, ethical propaganda, and social reform” that gathered
around philosopher Thomas Davidson in 1883), Seed-Time is associated
with what has been described as “the fons et origo of the later nineteenthcentury ethical socialism of England.”5 The Fellowship promoted a form
of socialism that prioritized the development of the individual spirit over
state reform, and individualism was not seen as being antithetical to
socialism, a philosophy which has strong resonances with Whitman’s celebration of both the individual and the social whole. The Labour Prophet,
the mouthpiece for the Labor Church, was fundamentally concerned
with the idea that socialism was a religious movement, and its owner,
editor, and chief contributor, John Trevor, explicitly defined himself
as a follower or disciple of Whitman.6 The Labour Leader appealed to a
broad socialist readership, and was very popular, claiming circulation
figures of 50,000 under Keir Hardie’s editorship. As the organ of the
Independent Labour Party (ILP), the weekly paper was associated
with ethical socialism, but it had a more pragmatic political focus than
Seed-Time or The Labour Prophet. It is therefore a useful counterpoint,
demonstrating how Whitman was included in a periodical that could
not be considered “Whitmanian” and presented to an audience that was
not always interested in the more esoteric interpretations of socialism.
“Ethical socialism” is a term that requires some clarification. The
1880s saw the beginnings of what has become known as the “socialist
116
revival,” traditionally divided by critics into three key strands. Stanley
Pierson, for example, summarizes:
Through the adaptation of Marxism to indigenous modes of thought and experience,
three more or less distinct versions of the Socialist ideology emerged—Social Democracy, Fabianism, and a less coherent form I have called Ethical Socialism.7
Most of the people who responded to Whitman were associated with
this third form of socialism, a broad category that included a range of
people, groups, and opinions. It was not attached to an organizational
body in the same way that Social Democracy or Fabianism were, but
it had strong links with the ILP, established in 1893, which became
Britain’s largest socialist organization. The ILP garnered a lot of support from the working class, especially in the industrial north, and labor
concerns were central to its philosophy. Many of its leading members
espoused or associated themselves with a version of socialism that included parliamentary politics but also looked towards a more visionary
social ideal. Mark Bevir suggests that “what distinguished the socialism of the ILP from most forms of continental Marxism was above all
else the presence of an ethical tone deriving from a vision of socialism
as a new religion requiring a new personal life.”8 The idea of a stable
tripartite division in British socialism is somewhat misleading, and, as
revisionist critic Anna Vaninskaya has recently demonstrated, there is
a considerable degree of overlap or “ideological hybridity” between the
strands.9 Nevertheless, as a descriptive rather than prescriptive label,
“ethical socialism” remains a useful term to refer to the type(s) of socialism that gave scope to what Pierson refers to as “ethical, aesthetic,
and religious aspirations.”10
In what remains the most detailed account of the dissemination
and reception of Whitman in Britain, Walt Whitman in England, Harold Blodgett explains Whitman’s appeal to the British in terms of his
visionary democracy, suggesting that “in its social aspect Leaves of
Grass appealed to English radicals—and others who might deny the
title—not so much as a panegyric of political democracy as a powerfully suggestive plea for ‘brotherhood.’”11 Yet, as Steven Yeo shows
in “A New Life: The Religion of Socialism, 1883-1896,” many of the
“radicals” involved in fin de siècle British socialism saw no such division between “brotherhood” (or “comradeship” or “fellowship”) and
“political democracy.”12 Yeo traces some of the ways that socialism
assumed a religious character during this period and revises standard
interpretations of the phenomenon. Rather than dismissing it as “an
anachronistic, ‘substitute’ religion, filling a gap left by declining ‘orthodox’ religion,” or “the moralising dress worn by socialists because
of the historical peculiarities of British popular and middle-class cul117
ture,” Yeo argues that it had a “maximum presence” and contributed
significantly to a “distinctive phase in the social history of socialism,”
characterized by creativity, force and vitality.13 The construction of
socialism in religious terms allows the literature that inspired it to be
regarded as sacred, their own texts divinely inspired, and their authors
prophets. Yeo gives examples of Tolstoyans in Purleigh and Ruskinians in Liverpool, as well as the Bolton Whitmanites, as groups who
“gathered to follow prophets.”14 Whitman was often invoked in this
way; an important part of the “religion of socialism” was an emphasis
on fellowship—this was evident, for example, in the popularity of the
Labor Church movement and the Clarion groups—and it is easy to see
how Whitman’s ideas about comradeship and democratic unity could
be seen to support the vision of a socialist fellowship.
Literature in Socialist Journalism
Amongst others, M. Wynn Thomas and Michael Robertson have analyzed aspects of this socialist appropriation of Whitman, yet his treatment in the socialist press has yet to be examined in any detail.15 Deian
Hopkin remarks that “socialists and radicals in Britain have always
believed in the power of the press to influence politics,” and certainly
these periodicals and papers helped to foster a socialist community (or
rather, a number of socialist communities), while providing a forum
where ideas could be exchanged and developed.16 They contributed to
the spread of socialism both through the dissemination of its political
philosophy and by providing information about organizations, meetings, demonstrations, and other related activities. Walt Whitman’s
inclusion in these publications demonstrates clearly how he was “impressed into service” for the socialist cause.17 Here, Jerome McGann’s
theory of textuality has purchase: the argument that “different texts”
are present in the same literary work and are brought into being not
only through variations in the reader but by the physical properties of
the text can help to explain the implications of reproducing Whitman’s
poetry (and sometimes prose) in a socialist journal or newspaper.18 If
a poem is printed on a newspaper page between a report about a labor
strike and an article about economics, it will lend itself to a different
reading than if it was encountered, for example, in a literary anthology.
Producing Whitman’s work in socialist periodicals caused it to acquire
socialist connotations, and even if the reader passed over the excerpts
reprinted from Leaves of Grass, Whitman was frequently invoked in
articles and commentary, ensuring that his name was associated with
socialist ideology. Socialist periodicals, however, were also “impressed
into service” for Whitman’s cause: his “message” was brought to people
who might not otherwise read his poetry, and if he was used to illustrate
118
or teach about socialism, conversely these publications were also used
to further his reputation.
In the nineteenth century, journals played a pivotal role in shaping literary culture, circulating literature, reviews, and notices of
forthcoming publications.19 Socialist journals performed this function
in a specifically democratic context, and, in keeping with democratic
beliefs that could incorporate both parliamentary politics and spiritual
utopianism, the democratic literary culture that they helped to create
was broad enough to encompass both economic theory and creative
writing. As Ruth Livesey observes: “This inclusiveness, this refusal to
divide aesthetics and politics (as well as idealism and materialism) as
an either/or, was one of the defining characteristics of British socialism as it gained force in the early 1880s.”20 Terry Eagleton colorfully
describes this expansiveness:
Fin-de-siècle intellectuals blend belief systems with staggering nonchalance, blithely
confident of some invisible omega point at which Baudelaire and Kropotkin consort
harmoniously together and Emerson lies down with Engels.21
The dissemination of this aesthetic culture served a variety of purposes:
literature was used to forward spiritual interpretations of socialism
and to further a deeper understanding of “true” democracy, but it was
also employed more didactically in order to “educate” an increasingly
literate laboring class.
Poetry was used in socialist periodicals in two main ways. First,
poetry that was specifically socialist was used directly as propaganda
for the movement. This constitutes the vast majority of the poetry that
was published and reviewed, and it was contributed not only by people
who were primarily poets, but also by columnists, activists, and readers.
For example, Keir Hardie, John Bruce Glasier, and Katharine Glasier
wrote poetry for The Labour Leader (though not while they were serving in editorial roles). Fin de siècle socialist poetry overtly promoted
its political ideology and depicted events and situations relating to the
labor movement; the poems usually had conventional stanzaic structures, regular metrical patterns and rhyme schemes, and though they
could be comical, more frequently they made use of an emotive register.
Anne Janowitz suggests that such poems were part of a “communitarian
strain” of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry which claimed
and created a poetic and literary culture in the name of the “people”:
Chartism fully engaged itself to the interventionist aspect of romantic poetics, and so
provides a literary link between the communitarian strain evinced in the decades of
romantic lyricism, and the socialist poetics of the end of the century.22
119
Certainly, though socialist poetry has not caught the academic imagination in the same way that Chartist poetry has, there are clear formal
connections between the two, and Chartist poets such as Ebenezer Elliott and Gerald Massey were published in socialist periodicals alongside
socialist poets.23
The second key way that poetry featured in socialist periodicals
was in the inclusion of established and well-known poets, who were
reprinted less frequently but commented on and referred to more often. Writing about the Fabian Society in The New England Magazine
in 1894, William Clarke, a radical journalist who was first a founding
member of the Fellowship of the New Life and then a Fabian, discussed
how such literature had contributed towards the increased popularity
of socialism in Britain:
I should name among individual writers who have powerfully aided the growth, I do
not say of Socialism itself, but of the feeling in the soil of which Socialism is easily developed, Dickens, Victor Hugo, Carlyle, Whitman, Ruskin, Tolstoi, Zola, and Arnold.24
Clarke makes a useful distinction: established poets, including so-called
“democratic poets” such as Whitman and Shelley, were rarely championed in concrete terms as “socialist poets,” but were instead seen to
perform some kind of elusive “fertilising function.” Clarke contends
that a “new spirit in literature” was one of the reasons why socialism
had become increasingly popular, and this was supported by other political and literary commentators: in The Labour Leader a writer using
the initials “W.B.” also identified a “new spirit” in Victorian literature
which “connotes a movement towards Socialism”; in To-day Percival
Chubb suggested that socialism drew its “vital force” not from economists or Marx, but from writers who have “quickened and nourished
in us a deeper sense of human dignity, a more exacting demand for
freedom, a keener susceptibility to beauty and recoil from ugliness, a
wider sympathy, and more uniting spirit of comradeship.”25
As the key Whitmanian word “comradeship” may suggest, in
articles of this type, Whitman is almost always named as one of the
authors who writes out of and contributes towards this “new spirit,” and
he is often heralded as being one of the most important. However, his
treatment in the socialist press differed from paper to paper, from year
to year, and from journalist to journalist. For some writers, Whitman
was only one of the many poets, novelists, playwrights, and essayists who
contributed towards a democratic aesthetic; yet others, like Alfred Orage
in The Labour Leader, believed that Whitman was crucially important to
the socialist movement, and some, such as John Trevor in The Labour
Prophet, even elevated Leaves of Grass to the status of a religious text.
Though Whitman was not always revered, the vehement criticism of
120
his work often found in the mainstream press was absent from socialist
periodicals; in the publications that I consulted, the formal properties of
Leaves of Grass were sometimes satirized, but when they were discussed
they were always defended. Whitman’s poetry was incorporated into
articles on the “big topics” of religion, politics, and literature but was
also used in less weighty, and sometimes light-hearted, contexts such
as cycling, school board elections, children’s work, physical health,
and holidays. He was sometimes used for didactic purposes but was
also often referred to neutrally in passing. The political, spiritual, and
literary preferences of those involved determined how Whitman was
presented to the reader, but the pattern is not always what might be
expected. For example, in The Labour Leader Whitman was included
more often under Keir Hardie’s editorship than that of either John
Bruce or Katharine Glasier, despite Hardie being, at best, ambivalent
towards the poet, while Whitman was central to the Glasiers’ social
and spiritual ideology.
Seed-Time: Regenerating the Individual
Over Seed-Time’s nine-year quarterly run, Whitman was mentioned
more often, and was the subject of more in-depth commentary, than
any other poet (also discussed in detail were two contemporary socialist
poets, Bessie Joynes and Alfred Hayes; Edward Carpenter; and, more
briefly, John Greenleaf Whittier).26 There are three long articles that
discuss his work and his character very favorably, and shorter references
to him are always positive. In articles about other subjects, his was the
most frequently-quoted poetry. Emerson and Thoreau also featured
extensively, and, as Bevir comments, “many of the members of the
Fellowship adopted an ethical socialism indebted to American romanticism.”27 As previously mentioned, Seed-Time and The Fellowship of
the New Life advanced a form of socialism that was not in antagonism
to individualism; for example, a member of the Fellowship, Herbert
Rix, declared:
The true antagonism is not between socialism and individualism, but between socialism and capitalism. That capitalism has come to be called “individualism” I regard as
a misfortune. . . . True individualism, I hold, will be the outcome and fairest flower
of socialism.28
Alongside Emerson and Thoreau, Whitman’s philosophy lent itself to
being interpreted in a way that both inspired and supported such a view.
None of Whitman’s poems were reprinted in their entirety, but
this is not surprising as Seed-Time included at most one poem per issue
121
(often none at all), and all of these were by committed socialists. It did,
however, publish a paragraph from Democratic Vistas in April 1892:
The purpose of democracy—supplanting old belief in the necessary absoluteness of
establish’d dynastic rulership, temporal, ecclesiastical, and scholastic, as furnishing the
only security against chaos, crime, and ignorance—is, through many transmigrations
and amid endless ridicules, arguments, ostensible failures, to illustrate, at all hazards,
this doctrine or theory that man, properly train’d in sanest, highest freedom, may and
must become a law, and series of laws, unto himself, surrounding and providing for,
not only his own personal control, but all his relations to other individuals and to the
State; and that . . this . . is the only scheme worth working from, as warranting results
like those of Nature’s laws, reliable, when once establish’d, to carry on themselves.29
The passage appears at the bottom of the page without commentary.
Partly, it acts as a space-filler, but it also reinforces and reiterates the
principles of the Fellowship: the extract from Whitman corresponds
with the group’s interpretation of the “purpose” of socialism, and
therefore functions as a rewording of the message that it promoted.
The theme of the paragraph is introduced in its opening clause, in an
authoritative tone: “the purpose of democracy.” Neither Whitman nor
Seed-Time is concerned here with specific methods of bringing about
political change or descriptions of the form this should take, but rather
with the very reason for embracing democracy at all. In order to find
out this “purpose,” the reader must negotiate a convoluted series of
subclauses: the first sentence runs for thirteen lines in Seed-Time before
a semi-colon indicates that it is syntactically complete, and there is only
one full stop at the end of the paragraph. Once these qualifiers are traversed, the reason is revealed to be two-fold: first, man must become
a law “unto himself”; second, this would affect his connections with
other members of society and the political nation.
The first part of this “purpose” can be related to Emerson’s proposal that man should stand in “an original relation to the universe,”
a concept specifically endorsed in other Seed-Time articles.30 William
Jupp, for example, reflected on the concept of discipleship and invoked
both Emerson and Whitman to forward the idea that each person’s
ultimate goal should be to reach the stage where he “need be a disciple
no more.”31 Jupp illustrates this principle with an extract from Whitman’s “Starting from Paumanok”:
I conn’d old times,
I sat studying at the feet of the great masters.
In the name of these states shall I scorn the antique?
Why these are the children of the antique to justify it.
Dead poets, philosophers, priests,
Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since,
122
Language-shapers on other shores,
Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn, or desolate,
I dare not proceed till I respectively credit what you have left wafted hither;
I have perused it, own it is admirable (moving awhile among it),
Think nothing can ever be greater, nothing can ever deserve more than it
deserves;
Regarding it all intently a long while, then dismissing it,
I stand in my place with my own day here.32
Whitman advocates a break from all ecclesiastic, monarchic, and
intellectual figures of authority, but it is qualified by the fact that the
past must first be “conn’d” or “studied.” The structure of the passage
reinforces this concept: the reader must progress through eleven lines
that acknowledge the importance of the past before reaching the turn
where it is resolutely “dismissed.” When used by Jupp, the “languageshapers on other shores” include Whitman himself: here and elsewhere
in Seed-Time he is not followed apostolically but is treated instead as a
philosopher of democracy.
The second part of the democratic “purpose,” the subject of the
second sentence in the paragraph from Democratic Vistas, was its social
effect: when an individual attained the “highest freedom” it would radiate into all of his relationships and so determine the character of first
the community and then the nation. This resonates with the way the
Fellowship tended to see social reform as an important but secondary
correlate of individual regeneration. Whitman introduces the concept
of “Nature,” which aligns democratic principles with biological law:
the way that the extract is edited suggests that once democracy had
been “establish’d” it would perpetuate itself, which points towards the
idea, often found in socialist rhetoric, that democratic progress was an
evolutionary certainty. However, the sentiment expressed in Democratic
Vistas is distorted; without the omissions, the phrase reads:
And that, while other theories, as in the past histories of nations, have proved wise
enough, and indispensable perhaps for their conditions, this, as matters now stand in
our civilized world, is the only scheme worth working from, as warranting results like
those of Nature’s laws, reliable, when once establish’d, to carry on themselves. (PP 966)
Though Whitman does not directly mention America, he sets up an
opposition between it and other nations using a rhetoric which alludes
to the concept of manifest destiny, implicitly suggesting that though
democracy may not have been appropriate for Britain, it was demanded
by the youthful American nation. By removing these lines, Whitman’s
interpretation of democracy and the Fellowship’s seem to be in perfect
accord, lending the weight of literary support to Seed-Time’s ethical
position. Whitman’s treatise on American democracy is stripped of its
123
national focus and is made to speak for democracy in general, therefore
including rather than excluding Britain in its “scheme.”
The Labour Prophet: Preaching a Free Religion
There are similarities between the underlying ideologies of Seed-Time
and The Labour Prophet, established by John Trevor in 1892 as the organ
of the Labor Church.33 The monthly Labour Prophet also championed
an “original” relationship between each individual and the divine, and
rejected the notion that the Bible was the only sacred text; Emerson,
Thoreau, and Whitman were considered to be of prime importance,
and their characters as well as their work were invoked for spiritual
inspiration. Bevir draws parallels between Jupp and Trevor, asserting
that they “did not so much convert to socialism as redescribe their immanentist theology and ethic of fellowship as socialism.”34 Like Jupp,
Trevor believed that Whitman embodied what the human race could
become, but he explained it even more explicitly in religious terms; as
Michael Robertson states, “Trevor tirelessly promoted Whitman, whom
he described as ‘nearer to God than any man on earth.’”35 Accordingly,
he urged the socialist reader to enter into an intimate spiritual relationship with Whitman.
For most of The Labour Prophet’s run, John Trevor’s voice dominated the paper and therefore, though most of the print-space was
dedicated to the discussion and coverage of social and political activism,
Whitman was invoked again and again in a way that other poets were
not.36 The Labour Prophet conformed to the pattern of printing mainly
contemporary socialist poetry: in 1892 there was no earlier work by
established poets; in 1893 and 1894 there were poems by Whitman and
Lowell; in 1895 there were poems by Oliver Wendell Holmes, William
Dean Howells, and Lowell; in 1896 there were poems by Swinburne,
Whittier, Blake, and Lowell; and there was none again in 1897, The
Labour Prophet’s final year of publication. This list seems to reveal the
importance of the American romantics, especially Lowell, rather than
Whitman, and yet the other poets were not used in the same messianic
or prophetic way. Whitman was discussed in detail and mentioned in
passing more often than any other poet in the paper’s publication history, and he was the only poet to be the subject of long articles, some of
which appeared on the front page.37 He was frequently used to punctuate
moral, political, or spiritual points; for example, phrases such as “let
us quote an appropriate word from Whitman,” “if, as Whitman puts
it,” and “as Whitman says” recur through pieces on social and political
rather than literary themes. This indicates that for Trevor, Whitman had
not merely written words that were beautiful or illustrative like those
124
of Lowell and the other poets that he included; rather, Whitman was
believed to be a visionary spiritual guide for the socialist movement.
Trevor’s claim that Whitman was “nearer to god than any man
on earth” identifies Whitman as a Christ-like figure, and he generally
discussed the poet within a Christian rhetorical framework. This use
of rhetoric mirrors the way that Labor Churches appropriated the institutional structure of Christianity, holding alternative Sunday services
and singing socialist hymns, rather than approaching spirituality from
a radically different angle. It introduces a tension that runs through
Trevor’s treatment of Whitman in The Labour Prophet and can clearly
be seen in the editorial published in April 1892, the month after Whitman’s death. His subject is the need for each person to have an original
relationship with the divine, which is introduced using quotations from
Leaves of Grass. Trevor then begins, using an intimate style which reveals
a sense of his own personality and creates the impression of direct and
personal communication with the reader:
I cannot get along with “the editorial ‘we.’” I must abandon it. I am very conscious of
being myself, and only myself. I am tired, worried, overworked. [. . .] I am in a mood
to understand the words of that simple-minded Galilean who threw up his carpentering and trusted God and Life.38
The confession of weakness attempts to draw the writer and reader
closer together, but as the reference to Jesus suggests, this is a pastoral
relationship, and therefore, Trevor assumes a position of moral and
spiritual authority. This is sealed in his appeal to the reader at the end
of the article: “my friend, have YOU anything to thank Walt Whitman
for?” Whitman is introduced as an alternative messianic figure who was
able, like Christ, to aid the reader in everyday life, and the editorial
closes with an address to the poet which reads like a prayer of gratitude:
“Thank you, Walt Whitman, for the lift you have given me along the
road of life. I feel rested, contented, resolute to trudge on my way and
not turn back.” By doing so, Trevor makes socialism into a religion,
with Whitman as its spiritual figurehead.
Trevor contends that Jesus comes “at second-hand,” his words
having been “imagined” by men and filtered through Christian institutions, yet Whitman is seen as being unmediated; Trevor claims that
Whitman’s words came to him as straight from the poet’s heart “as ink
and paper permit.” Christian conceptions of the sacredness of scripture
are contested, and personal experience is elevated above the text; in his
spiritual autobiography he instructs the reader:
Base your religion on a book, and the book may be upset, and your religion go with
it, at any rate for a long time. Determine that you will base your religion on your own
125
experiences—which means that you will guide your life day by day by your own conclusions—and whatever art of living you acquire you will never lose.39
This idea is illustrated with three extracts from Leaves of Grass that
are given at the beginning of the editorial. The first is from “A Song
for Occupations”:
We consider Bibles and religions divine—I do not say they are not divine.
I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still,
It is not they who give the life—it is you who give the life,40
Whitman challenges the traditional Christian understanding of sacredness, but disputes the dominance of established faiths and sacred texts
rather than rejecting them outright. Their position is reconsidered: they
are part of a “whole” but are not the whole itself. This is reinforced by
the structure of the extract: each of these three lines is balanced over
a caesura; the first clause is syntactically complete but is qualified and
added to by the second. The repetitions across the caesura-divide of
“divine,” “grown/grow,” and “life” emphasize the sense of repositioning:
the words are re-contextualized in the second clause to put the focus
of divine energy onto the “you.”
This movement is reiterated in the second extract, the concluding
stanza of “A Song for Occupations” which begins:
When the psalm sings instead of the singer;
When the script preaches instead of the preacher;
When the pulpit descends and goes instead of the carver that carved the
supporting desk;
When I can touch the body of books, by night or by day, and when they touch
my body back again;
When the holy vessels, or the bits of the Eucharist, or the lath and the plast
procreate as effectually as the young silver-smiths, or bakers, or the masons
in their over-alls;
[. . .]
I intend to reach them my hand, and make as much of them as I do of men
and women like you.41
Religion is represented synecdochally through the component parts of
a church: the objects in it (“script,” “books,” “holy vessels”) and the
structure itself (“lath and plast”). Like the passage above, this stanza
is also characterized by a sense of balance: Whitman’s anaphoric catalogue juxtaposes each item with a person, highlighting how inadequate
“sacred” objects are when compared to the power of the individual. Sex
is procreative, suggesting that this power is specifically generative. The
final quotation, from “Song of Myself,” emphasizes the idea that God is
126
found through the acts of daily life rather than in books: “Why should
I wish to see God better than this day? / I see something of God each
hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then.”42
Whitman’s value therefore lay in the fact that he offered a direct and
unmediated source of spiritual guidance, which would in turn enable
all individuals to have their own direct and unmediated relationship
with the divine. Obviously, this is paradoxical: not only does Whitman himself act as a mediating figure, but Trevor mediates Whitman
for the reader through the writing of the article and the selective use
of passages from Leaves of Grass. Trevor’s elevation of experience over
literature does not prevent him from forming his own canon of sacred
texts, and he reads Leaves of Grass as scripture: “To-day [Whitman]
is part of my Bible”; “I take down my familiar volume of Whitman,
well thumbed, and marked all through, and say at once that here is a
volume of my Bible, my Book of Life.”43 He presses a relationship with
Whitman on the reader, rather than simply offering it as a possibility or
model. In the fifth paragraph of the April editorial he makes a sustained
challenge to the reader:
Do you understand these words of Walt Whitman’s which I have written out for you?
[. . .] It will pay you to ponder them, to go over them again and again, and yet again,
until you clearly understand and feel what they are saying to you. Have you scanned
them over and found them meaningless? Do you pass them by, thinking Whitman a
mystic fool? [. . .] Go to, my friend, go to! Read them once more, and yet once more,
and go not away condemned.44
Having established a pastoral bond with his readers, Trevor now preaches to them. His style recalls pulpit oratory: an insistent sermonizing
tone is created by the combination of rhetorical questions, imperative
commands, and exclamatory punctuation. The syntactical inversion
of the final phrase recalls the style of the King James Bible, and the
introduction of the notion of condemnation resonates more with the
Christian doctrine that the article overtly refutes than with the free
religion promoted by the Labor Church (its third principle is that each
man is “free to develop his own relations with the Power that brought
him into being”).45
In the same article, socialist agitation is also described using a
Christian lexical register: “We incontinently desire to have God’s kingdom set up ‘on earth,’ and this means rough work in an age in which
Mammon is chiefly worshipped.” Though Trevor does not seem to
recognize the irony in using Christian discourses to champion Whitman, he is alert to the rhetorical strategies at play here. He addresses
the fact that he employs Christian terminology and explains it on the
grounds that capitalists “call themselves Christian” implying that a
127
familiar discourse was strategically employed in order to communicate
the principles of socialism more effectively. Like the extracts that Trevor
uses from Leaves of Grass, the biblical reference to bringing about the
kingdom of God on earth is concerned with the manifestation of the
divine in the physical present, and socialism is thus associated with
Whitman’s spiritual ideas. Significantly, socialism is inserted into an
article about Whitman rather than the other way around; for Trevor, it
was not so much that Whitman was part of a socialist literary culture,
as that socialism was considered to be a part of a Whitmanian spiritual
democracy.
The Labour Leader: Educating Socialists
Although, as Sheila Rowbotham suggests, The Labour Prophet “worked
alongside” the Social Democratic Federation and the Fabians, it was
“closely bound up” with the ILP.46 There was a strong connection
between the Labor Church and the ILP: Pierson observes that the
majority of Labor Churches were established in northern ILP strongholds such as Yorkshire and Lancashire, and he suggests that Labor
Church expansion “coincided rather closely with the growth of the
ILP.”47 Correspondingly, there was a link between The Labour Prophet
and The Labour Leader, the organ of the ILP, which began life as The
Miner but was re-launched by Keir Hardie as The Labour Leader in
1888 and began to be published as a weekly in 1894. Not only did the
Prophet and the Leader report on the activities of the other movement,
but in 1894 Trevor changed the format of The Labour Prophet in an attempt to reduce printing costs, and the Labor Church news section was
transferred to The Labour Leader.48 Though The Labour Leader did not
always consider the religious aspect of socialism to be vital, spirituality
was incorporated into the coverage of a broad socialist program that
included strikes and protests, political reform, welfare work, children’s
education, and recreational activities. The Labour Leader included pieces
about literature and democratic philosophy, but its focus was more on
current events than either Seed-Time or The Labour Prophet.
It sought to provide an alternative source of information to the
mainstream press and did so by adopting a weekly broadsheet format
which incorporated a variety of columns by different correspondents.
These contributors held different opinions about the nature of socialism and the best way to pursue the democratic ideal: some thought that
electoral gain was the only effective medium by which social reform
could be achieved, while others believed in a spiritual socialism which
they felt was limited or sullied by parliamentary politics. This affected
Whitman’s treatment within The Labour Leader, which was much more
varied than in either The Labour Prophet or Seed-Time. Generally speak128
ing, Whitman was less important to those who considered parliamentary
politics to be paramount than he was to those who embraced a more
Utopian socialism.
Though the overarching religious context in which The Labour
Prophet considered matters of social and economic reform was mostly
absent from The Labour Leader, a notable exception was Alfred Orage’s
literary column “Past, Present, and Future: A Bookish Causerie.” The
column ran between November 30, 1895, and July 31, 1897, and the
frequency with which it invoked Whitman caused him to be mentioned
more in The Labour Leader in 1896 than in any other year. Like Trevor,
Orage used a spiritual vocabulary to discuss Whitman, but he moved
away from a Christian framework. He informed Edward Carpenter
in a letter that “A Bookish Causerie” was an attempt to “read modern
literature in the light of the new old conception you and Whitman have
done so much to spread”:
To go still further and more persistently into what inwardly I feel to be the deepest
need of thousands like myself, the need for a sure foundation in one’s own soul for
the more or less superficial and transitory beliefs, intellectual physical and ethical.49
The pairing of Whitman and Carpenter was not uncommon; Thomas
observes that Whitman’s vision was often associated with “English
prophets of socialism” and argues that “implicit in such strategies is a
repudiation of the Americanness of Whitman the prophet.”50 This can
be seen at work in Orage’s rhetoric which appeals to a sense of universal (rather than local) need; the oxymoronic “new old” suggests that
Whitman and Carpenter’s “conception” relates to old truths which had
been discovered anew, echoing Carpenter’s own belief that progress was
bound into the notion of cyclicality.
Pierson suggests that, like Carpenter and a number of others
within the Socialist movement, Orage “was blending the mysticism of
the East with the evolutionary optimism characteristic of late Victorian
culture to provide a new foundation for personal and social hopes,” and
certainly, like Carpenter, Orage saw socialism as a stage in a greater
process of human development which Whitman was seen to be a part
of.51 In one example, a poem dedicated to Whitman and written in a
similar style is reprinted from Horace Traubel’s The Conservator, and
Orage then responds:
See, comrade? Then about Socialism—there is a profounder cause than that lying
indeed beneath all causes. Socialism is a mood of the great mind. It is a recognisable
point in the evolution of the profounder cause of humanity, which itself, maybe, is
only a point in a still profounder cause. Who knows? I give it up for a while, perhaps
for a millennium. Who knows? 52
129
Despite the lack of Christian rhetoric, there are parallels between
Trevor’s editorial and this passage. Orage also adopts an oratorical style,
and directly addresses the reader, with whom he establishes a pastoral
relationship; he teaches the reader while acknowledging that he does
not understand everything. The philosophy recalls Carpenter’s belief in
a far-reaching evolution of human consciousness, and the reference to
Whitman guides the socialist reader towards a realization that the socialist movement is only one manifestation of a higher mystical process.53
Orage believed that alongside Carpenter’s Towards Democracy,
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was of particular importance in this evolutionary development towards the democratic ideal. He asserted that
Whitman and Carpenter were elevated “above the ordinary rank of
poets into that of prophets of democracy.”54 On more than one occasion he offered to procure the texts for readers who were unable to find
them: “If there are any comrades who would like a complete edition
of Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’—indeed, his own big, splendid, lordly
edition—I can get it for them”; “If you have any difficulty getting ‘Towards Democracy’ (5s.) or ‘Leaves of Grass’ (9s.) send to me.”55 No
other books were promoted in such a way. Orage’s offer specifically
applies to the “complete” 1892 Leaves of Grass, which implies that he
believed, as Whitman did, that it was important to read the poetry in
its entirety. This places a value on the “whole” which runs through his
appreciation of the two poets: “Whitman and Carpenter, and indeed
the whole democratic movement, are testimonies to the growth of the
conception of non-Differentiation, or non-Separateness.”56 In a later
article he added, “To express the universal in terms of humanity—this
is the function of the poet of Democracy.”57 For Orage, the expression
of the “universal” was reliant on form:
That, it seems to me, is the one essential difference between the poets of democracy
and the poets of old time. They of the romantic age had the form void of spirit; we
have the spirit void of form. That it is a spirit capable of a form which shall displace
all previous forms produced under opposite conditions we can only surmise: but
there is Whitman to lend our surmise strength, and who now shall give it certainty? 58
The distinctive formal properties of Whitman’s poetry were seen to be
both evidence of the growth of an all-encompassing spirit of democracy
and the means by which it could be communicated.
Most Labour Leader contributors did not treat Whitman with
the same degree of reverence shown by Orage. On a few occasions in
the mid-1890s, satirists who wrote under pseudonyms parodied Whitman’s poetic style for didactic purposes. In one such piece a writer
calling himself “The Wastrel” presents a series of short mock-editorials
130
for The Labour Leader in the style of eleven writers including Morris,
Burns, Carlyle, Tennyson, and Longfellow. He begins with Whitman:
O, reader mine, you cannot escape me! This is no paper; it is a man. i long to enter
your heart (many are the empty hearts) and lodge there. Were the Leader a twopenny
paper, all’s well; were it otherwise, all’s well. i assert that all past issues were what they
should have been, and that they could nohow have been better than they were, and
that this number is what it should be, and that the I.L.P. Directory is, and that this
number and directory could nohow be better than the way they are.59
Parody relies on familiarity, and so the inclusion of Whitman is significant in itself: it shows that readers of a popular socialist newspaper were
assumed to have read, or at least heard of, Whitman’s poetry. Initially
it seems that the piece was intended simply as entertainment, but after
the parodies there is a turn:
If i hadn’t been in the dry dock for want of boots i’d never have written the above.
Poverty has its own revenge. As i remarked long ago there’s nothing new but style, yet
style is easily imitated when you have’nt one of your own.60
“The Wastrel” self-reflexively examines the notion of satire, using style
as a metaphor for political voice. Lack of possessions is associated with
lack of style (exacerbated by the use of the lower case “i”), a silencing
which implies a lack of power. However, as “the Wastrel” makes a show
of demonstrating, aesthetics can be appropriated and made to speak for
the voiceless, and here, as elsewhere in socialist discourse, Whitman’s
“voice” is put to work for this cause.
In another piece, a writer using the pseudonym “Ben” uses Whitman’s voice to speak against something rather than for someone. The
subject matter is introduced in the first one-word line, “Advertisements!”; materialism and unnecessary reliance on consumer goods are
also implicitly challenged. The second stanza reads:
Hoardings, shop fronts, sky signs, back and front pages of magazines and periodicals,
Then between boards promenading in the gutters,
Railway stations, embankments,
The old weather-beaten fences by the sides of the railways and roads,
Boards standing on private lands,
Designs and letters variegated, illuminated, gas-lighted, electric.
Omnibuses, tramcars, vans and carts used in trade;
Popular novels are not greater in fiction than you.61
“Ben” employs the Whitmanian catalogue in order to emphasize the
extent to which advertising pervaded daily life, creating the impression that advertising dominated every aspect of the social whole. The
131
ironic application of the word “greater” mimics the celebratory style
often adopted by Whitman while denouncing advertising as deceptive.
Similarly, like Whitman in “Respondez!,” “Ben” uses the technique of
ironically lauding the very thing that he censures:
Intolerant persons would limit you, O advertisements;
I bid you not to be limited.
Uprear yourselves militant, triumphant for ever.62
Thus “Ben” co-opts Whitman’s style to warn, in a light-hearted
way, against the dangers of advertising. This can be interpreted as a
“friendly” use of the poet, in the sense that “Ben” has joined with the
“poet of democracy” in order to more effectively denounce materialism.
However, “Ben” uses parody to ridicule the ubiquity and command
of advertising, and so also ridicules Whitman. On one level, this is
simply a matter of humor, but it can also be seen as a challenge to one
of the central tenets of Whitman’s verse, that good and bad should be
equally included: “What is called good is perfect, and what is called
bad is just as perfect.”63 The opening line “Advertisements!” also acts
as an apostrophe, and so “Ben” plays with the slippery “you” in Leaves
of Grass, questioning whether everything in the social “whole” should
be celebrated indiscriminately. For “Ben” and other socialist journalists, it was fundamentally important that capitalism and the conditions
that it created should be renounced, not included, in their social vision.
Socialist historiographies tend to describe a movement from the
spiritual or ethical socialism of the late nineteenth century to the municipal or state socialism of the early twentieth; Anna Vaninskaya challenges such a historical paradigm, which she explains thus:
The compulsion to express antagonistic conceptual categories like communalism and
statism in terms of a historical progression was always strong, and few of those who
articulated such a dichotomy could avoid viewing it in temporal terms. The temptation was to focus on the historical shift from the one to the other, on the process by
which modern pragmatic statism outgrew and eventually ousted communalism in the
realm of practical possibility, by which the combination of Fabianism and Labourism
came to represent British socialism in the twentieth century.64
Undoubtedly, Vaninskaya is right to question the myth-making of a
fin de siècle “golden age of socialism” and to draw attention to the fact
that strains of “communitarian” or spiritual socialism reached far back
into the nineteenth century and also forward into the twentieth and
twenty-first. However, there was a definite change in the prevailing
socialist “mood” and this was reflected in the movement’s periodicals
and newspapers: though contributors to The Labour Leader such as J.H.
Harley campaigned well into the first decade of the twentieth century
132
for the “soul of socialism,” it was because the movement was felt to be
lacking: “At the present time Socialism is dimly groping amid the material environment of its life, and Socialists, who cannot be fed on bread
alone, are trying to get to the real soul of the people.”65 Harley adds
that his readers “have only to study the ‘Labour and Literature’ page
of this paper to see what a medley of sometimes soulless books is issued
from the modern press.” Indeed, Alfred Orage’s “A Bookish Causerie”
began first to be written by other contributors and then phased out;
its tone became more serious, and it started to discuss and review only
non-fiction texts written explicitly about socialist practice and policy,
an approach which was continued in the successor column that Harley
refers to, “Labour and Literature.” Henry Salt also complained about
the changing role of literature in the socialist movement, again in the
The Labour Leader:
I doubt whether Socialists nowadays feel much interest in the poetry of the revolutionary movement. We have, it is true, our song­books and socialist choirs; but on the whole
we seem at the present to be so intoxicated by the charms of statistical science and
the study of economics that we have but little time for the trivialities of the Muse.66
That these debates were conducted in the pages of twentieth-century
socialist newspapers lends support to the argument that it is misleading to view socialist history in cut-and-dry dichotomies. Yet it would
also be misleading not to acknowledge that as the nineteenth century
came to a close, the spiritual and philosophical elements of socialism
became less of a force in The Labour Leader and other socialist publications, causing the place of literary “prophets” such as Walt Whitman
to become less assured.
University of Nottingham
NOTES
1 M. Wynn Thomas, “The English Whitman,” in Transatlantic Connections: Whitman
U.S, Whitman U.K. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005), 161-192. Hereafter,
Transatlantic Connections.
2 Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America,
1996), 954. Hereafter, PP.
3 Thomas, Transatlantic Connections, 197.
4 Deborah Mutch, English Socialist Periodicals, 1800-1900: A Reference Source (Aldshot: Ashgate, 2005), xii; Deian Hopkin, “The Left-Wing Press and the New Journalism,” in Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain, 1880s to 1914, ed. Joel
H. Weiner (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 226.
133
5 Maurice Adams to William Knight, in Knight, Memorials of Thomas Davidson,
The Wandering Scholar (Boston and London: Ginn, 1907), 16. The ideas debated
by the group were central to the socialist revival and many of its members became
actively involved in the socialist movement, but Davidson himself became wary of the
emphasis put on social and political reform, and in 1884 there was an amicable split
between the Fellowship and what was to become the Fabian Society. See Mark Bevir,
The Making of British Socialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 240246, hereafter, MBS; and Kevin Manton, “The Fellowship of the New Life: English
Ethical Socialism Reconsidered,” History of Political Thought 24:2 (Summer 2003),
282-304, for detailed accounts of the group’s development.
6 In the paper’s first editorial, Trevor states: “The publication of a paper in connection with the Labour Church movement has been undertaken, not only to meet the
demand for a propagandist organ for the furtherance of our own mission, but also
more generally to represent the religious life which inspires the labour movement”;
Labour Prophet (January 1892), 4.
7 Stanley Pierson, British Socialists: The Journey from Fantasy to Politics (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 2. Hereafter, From Fantasy to Politics.
8 Bevir, “British Socialism and American Romanticism,” English Historical Review
110:438 (September 1995), 878. For more on ethical socialism, see part three of
Bevir’s MBS, 215-316.
9 Anna Vaninskaya, William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History
and Propaganda, 1880-1914 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 145.
Hereafter, WMIC.
10 Pierson, From Fantasy to Politics, 34.
11 Harold Blodgett, Walt Whitman in England (New York: Cornell University Press,
1934), 219.
12 Steven Yeo, “A New Life: The Religion of Socialism,” History Workshop Journal
4:1 (Fall 1977).
13 Ibid., 6-7.
14 Ibid., 27.
15 Thomas, Transatlantic Connections; Michael Robertson, Worshipping Walt: The
Whitman Disciples (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Hereafter, Worshipping Walt.
16 Hopkin, “The Socialist Press in Britain, 1890-1910,” in Newspaper History from the
Seventeenth Century to the Present Day, ed. George Boyce, James Curran, and Pauline
Wingate (London: Constable, 1978), 294. Hopkin argues that the period from 1890 to
1910 was “a climacteric in the history of socialist journalism,” and relates this to technological advances in the printing industry and to the expansion of the electorate after
the 1884 Reform Act, which forced political parties to address a new body of electors.
17 The phrase is adapted from With Walt Whitman in Camden; Traubel records
Whitman’s response to a visit from a young Russian political revolutionary seeking
the poet’s seal of approval: “We had no quarrel—I only made it plain to him that I
was not to be impressed into that sort of service. Everybody comes here demanding
endorsements: endorse this, endorse that: each man thinks I am radical his way: I
suppose I am radical his way, but I am not radical his way alone.” Horace Traubel,
134
With Walt Whitman in Camden, 9 vols.; 1-3 (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 19061914; repr. 1961), 1: 65. Available on the Walt Whitman Archive (whitmanarchive.org).
18 Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1991), 9.
19 See Jock Macleod, “Between Politics and Culture: Liberal Journalism and Literary Culture at the Fin de Siècle,” in English Literature in Translation, 1800-1920 51:1
(2008), 5-22.
20 Ruth Livesey, “Socialism and Victorian Poetry,” Literature Compass 1 (2004), 1.
21 Terry Eagleton, “The Flight to the Real,” in Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle,
ed. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 12.
22 Anne Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the English Romantic Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 143; 28.
23 Mutch remarks that socialist literature has not gained the same “academic status”
as Chartist poetry; her indeces of literature published in socialist periodicals in English
Socialist Periodicals, 1880-1900 and forthcoming collection British Socialist Fiction,
1884-1914 works towards redressing this balance (viii). For a comprehensive study
of Chartist poetry, see Michael Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics,
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
24 William Clarke, “The Fabian Society,” New England Magazine 16:1 (March
1894), 95.
25 “W.B.,” “The Socialist Spirit in Victorian Literature,” Labour Leader (June 19,
1897), 206; Percival Chubb, “The Two Alternatives,” To-day (September 1887), 76.
26 Though Emerson was also featured, he was discussed as an essayist, not a poet.
27 Bevir, The Making of British Socialism, 244.
28 Herbert Rix, Sermons, Addresses, and Essays (London: Williams & Norgate,
1907), 193.
29 Seed-Time (April 1892), 9; Whitman, PP, 966. The two point ellipses indicate
omissions in the text in Seed-Time.
30 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 6th edn., ed.
G.T. Bettany (London: Ward, Lock, Bowden, 1889), 310.
31 William Jupp, “Freedom in Religious Thought and Life,” Seed-Time (January
1891), 1. Hereafter, “Freedom.”
32 Jupp, “Freedom,” 3; Whitman, PP, 178. There are small differences in the punctuation of Whitman’s poem in Leaves of Grass and in Seed-Time; here and elsewhere
in this article I give the poems as they appear in the periodicals.
33 For accounts of the establishment of the Labor Church and analyses of its role
see Stanley Pierson, “John Trevor and the Labor Church Movement in England,
1891-1900,” Church History, 29:4 (December 1960), 463-478 (hereafter, “John Trevor
and the Labor Church Movement”), and Bevir, “The Labour Church Movement,”
in MBS, 278-297.
34 Bevir, “Welfarism, Socialism, and Religion: On T.H. Green and Others,” Review
of Politics 55:4 (1993), 652.
135
35 Trevor, “Editorial,” Labour Prophet (April 1892). Hereafter, “Editorial” April
1892. Robertson, Worshipping Walt, 227.
36 Sheila Rowbotham observes that The Labour Prophet “propagated an ideological
melange of Ruskin, Whitman, Carpenter and Mazzini” and that its “broad take on
socialism could embrace municipal elections, William Morris, Walt Whitman and
Fred Charles.” Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (London:
Verso, 2008), 172. Hereafter, LLL.
37 Thoreau and Emerson were the only other literary figures to feature in similar
long articles. Again, Emerson was discussed as a prose writer and not a poet.
38 Trevor, “Editorial” April 1892.
39 Trevor, My Quest For God (London: Labour Prophet Office, 1897), 228.
40 Whitman, PP, 359.
41 Ibid., 362.
42 Ibid., 85.
43 Trevor, “Review,” Labour Prophet (March 1896), 40; Trevor, “Walt Whitman,”
Labour Prophet (February 1895), 1.
44 Trevor, “Editorial” April 1892.
45 Labour Prophet (February 1892), 16.
46 Rowbotham, LLL, 172.
47 Pierson, “John Trevor and the Labor Church Movement,” 468.
48 This proved to be so unpopular with Labour Prophet readers that the previous
format was returned to after only one issue, though the funding of the paper was
restructured to relieve Trevor from financial responsibility for the paper.
49 Alfred Orage to Carpenter (February 3, 1896), Sheffield Archives, Carpenter
Collection, MS 386/63.
50 Thomas, Transatlantic Connections, 166.
51 Pierson, From Fantasy to Politics, 193.
52 Orage, “A Bookish Causerie,” Labour Leader (February 22, 1896), 64. The
poem, “To Walt Whitman: In His Own Spirit,” by William Jay, reads: “You say to
me continually that I am as good as you: Very well, I am as good as you, / You shall
not be master, nor I disciple, / I come to you on equal terms, / I love you, but I do not
love you any more than I love others.”
53 Like Whitman’s Canadian disciple Richard Maurice Bucke (who wrote Cosmic
Consciousness after lengthy discussions with Carpenter), for Carpenter there were three
stages of consciousness: simple or animal consciousness, self-consciousness, and a
third stage of consciousness which Carpenter does not name or rigidly define, but it
involved an understanding of the essential interconnectedness of all humanity. See
Carpenter, Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning (London: George
Allen and Unwin, 1920), 16.
54 Orage, “A Bookish Causerie,” Labour Leader (October 24, 1896), 368.
136
55 Orage, “A Bookish Causerie,” Labour Leader (January 18, 1896), 18; (February
15, 1896), 60.
56 Orage, “A Bookish Causerie,” Labour Leader (March 21, 1896), 102.
57 Orage, “Towards Democracy,” Labour Leader (June 6, 1896), 197.
58 Orage, “A Bookish Causerie,” Labour Leader (January 25, 1896), 26.
59 “The Wastrel,” “Immortals as Editors,” Labour Leader (December 21, 1895), 6.
The lower case “i” is sic.
60 Ibid., 6.
61 “Ben,” “Whitmanesque,” Labour Leader (May 30, 1896), 183.
62 Ibid., 183.
63 Whitman, PP, 557.
64 Vaninskaya, WMIC, 156-157.
65 J.H. Harley, “The Soul of Socialism,” Labour Leader (June 19, 1905), 42.
66 Henry Salt, “Some Revolutionary Poets of the Century,” Labour Leader (June
19, 1897), 207.
137